Synthetic Painting Techniques
A synthetic painting technique is a digital image processing technique that attempts to apply some painting style (e.g., mosaic, pointillist, rough pastel, etc.) to digital images, for example digital photographs. For example, a “painterly” rendering technique is described by Hertzmann (Aaron Hertzmann. Painterly Rendering with Curved Brush Strokes of Multiple Sizes. In SIGGRAPH 98 Conference Proceedings, pages 453-460, July 1998.) Hertzmann describes an algorithm for converting a photographic image into a somewhat impressionistic painting. Hertzmann's technique has inspired many refinements, but remains the most commonly used painterly rendering technique.
Manipulating Stereoscopic Images
Stereoscopic images consist of a pair of images that correspond to the left and right eye views of a scene. Manipulating these two images independently can produce an image that can no longer be fused into a stereo image because of inconsistencies. For example, conventional techniques for applying painting algorithms and stylization techniques to stereo images produce results with many inconsistencies. Conventional approaches to such stylization techniques for stereo images have applied brush strokes to one image, used a disparity map to translate the strokes to the other image's viewpoint, and finally filled in unpainted areas in the second image with new strokes. However, because these new strokes are only visible in one view, inconsistencies may arise. For example, FIG. 1 shows results of a conventional “painterly” rendering technique applied to a stereo image pair. As indicated by the circled regions in FIG. 1, there are many inconsistent regions between the two views, at least some of which may be due to exaggerated stroke length. For example, the stroke length may not reflect the feature size, and long strokes may wander into undesirable regions.